"1/ Carbon versus wood.
It’s been a long experimental road and most years we build Race boards in wood and also in carbon to see the potential.
I first tried a wood sandwich board in New Caledonia back in 1986 and have been a fan ever after.
This year again we built from the very same Isonic mold , one board in 160 Gr carbon, one in 80 Gr carbon and one in Honey comb sandwich.
The result came out as in previous years, the carbon boards and the honey comb are lighter but not quite as fast as our wood sandwich boards.
In very light winds the materials provide similar potential, but as soon as we got up to speed , wood was a tiny bit faster.
We will keep on cross checking into the future as well, in case some new future carbon technologies prove to be faster.
In wave jumping and freestyle, its probably not so much about speed , but about the ability to jump and move the board in different positions while airborne, and here weight has been found to be important. We found that when we changed the lay up on race boards from wood to carbon we could save 150-300 grams, whereas in wave and freestyle, the boards were 500-800 grams lighter, this quite likely as the Race boards had less reinforcements to be reduced.